Restorative justice in Vienna

Source: (2001) Paper presented at the Restorative and Community Justice: Inspiring the Future conference, held in Winchester, England, 28-31 March.

A sociologist of law, Christa Pelikan is a researcher at the Institute for the Sociology of Law and Criminology in Vienna, Austria. In this paper she examines restorative justice in Vienna to identify its history, its successes, and its weaknesses and restrictions in the Austrian context. Restorative justice in Vienna, she believes, reflects the prospects for restorative justice in central and eastern Europe. Additionally, she uses the Viennese experience to indicate some of the basic and inherent tensions and challenges for restorative justice in general.